Western anti-Muslim hostility has been episodic and elite-driven, not a perpetual clash

Evidence

In Deepa Kumar’s view, Islamophobic myths of a perpetual struggle between Islam and the West, sometimes held in abeyance but always eventually resurfacing, seriously misrepresent history. Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an early, baffled curiosity to the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in Moorish Spain, the hostility of the Crusades, the Romantic-era fascination with the “Gorgeous East,” and the most recent phase in which U.S. policies toward Muslim countries have been pragmatic and varied. Along the way, anti-Muslim prejudice has been constructed and promoted by elites at certain times for political reasons, a process we can still trace today in the fulminations of populist politicians and journalists in search of an enemy to blame or a distraction from other problems. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 38

Categorization

• XREF: This misrepresentation-of-history framing connects to the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis the reader will interrogate in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — Hamid’s Changez explicitly narrativizes such a clash from within.